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Thursday, July 18, 2013

Part of me has put off sharing the basement tour because I still don’t feel like it’s completely finished. But it’s come such a long way over the last few months, that it’s still fun to share all the progress we’ve made. The basement room stood completely empty for the first few months of living here with the exception of a few random pieces of furniture that didn’t have a spot upstairs. It’s been a slow, steady process of finding things we need and love and could afford to fill the space and make it more comfortable and useable. There has also been some trial and error in figuring out the best way to arrange all the furniture in the basement. It’s such a large open space, we hardly knew where to begin. But for now, we have settled on a layout that seems to work for us. I love that our walk-out basement has so much light streaming in through the windows and sliding glass doors. When we were house hunting, we looked at so many houses that had damp, dark, dungeon like basements and I knew I just couldn’t deal with that. Plus, I knew our kids would never go down and play by themselves in a room like that, so it would end up being a pretty useless space for us. The great thing about this room is that it doesn’t feel like a basement at all.

We keep a lot of the kid’s toys down there, so they do end up spending a lot of time down there playing. And the guest room is right off of this room, so it gives guests extra space to spread out in and relax.

So with all that being said, welcome to our basement…

The stairs before and after

The stair transformation is one of my absolute favorites ever. If you missed my blog about the stairs, you can see it here.

I really wish I had taken a picture of the entire basement when we moved in, but I didn’t, so just picture it as one large empty room. I did remember to snap a picture of the fireplace.

The chairs are a Joss and Main find. I wanted something wicker that would give the room a little bit of a beachy cottagey feel. The little round banana fiber stools are from Ikea, as well as the curtains.

I’m not completely sure what kind of furniture this piece is. I found it at a thrift store and knew I could paint it and it would be great for storage. The top opens up with a shelf inside, so I think it’s some sort of antique victrola or something. We use it to store the kids games and puzzles. And the cubby shelf (from Home Goods) on top displays our growing nature collection.

The other side of the room…

The couches are Ikea Ektorp. Tim hunted them down on Craigslist. I did a lot of research on the practicality of white sofas and kids before we bought them. I didn’t want to add any more unnecessary hassles to my life. But in the end, I felt like they would work out fine. For one, our kids know not to get on them (or any furniture) if they are dirty. And two, I can just throw the slipcovers in the wash when they do get dirty. It’s not been an issue for us. I think I’ve washed them each once since getting them and that was mainly just because they had belonged to someone else before us. They’re also really comfortable, so we’ve been quite happy with them. I still want to get something on the wall above the loveseat. I’m thinking I would like a large, colorful wall map of the world hanging up there.

I made the “Happy” sign with some boards I had laying around. It took me forever to figure out what I wanted to say on them. I wanted it to have some sort of meaning to us. I finally settled on a line from the Sunshine song because we’ve been singing it to our kids since Tyson was born.